Icelander by Dustin Long
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
While entertaining and promising, Long’s book built on a legacy of a false saga seems more of an introduction than a true intermix. The story follows as the book jacket says, a reluctant heroine is pulled in to solve a mystery of a friend that she doesn’t want to solve. In a way, the ending and wrap seem rather contrived. The writing is clean. The footnotes are a nice touch, bringing to bear the extra “dimension” of the text. But the stumbling of the heroine into the lair, the expected confrontation and lack of resolution is damning (knowledge is often adequate for the mystery to be solved, but inadequate as a true resolution if at least someone is not caught, or a wrong is not righted). In that sense, this book, while organized around a mystery is not really a mystery novel, than it is an exploration into this world.
We have the pieces of all the conspiracy but nothing really happens. It is annoying in your traditional mystery novel where the heros discover the plot and then the last 50 pages is just the wrap up to spoil the bad guy’s plans, but in this, there seem to be almost no need to spoil any plans since the bad guys don’t seem to have any plans whatsoever.
Instead we are left with a hole where neither side can move forward. The comparisons with Pynchon are many, but we do need to have an ending that extends beyond the text of the book, and that doesn’t seem to really happen here. Instead we are left with many pieces where it seems that the bad guy was in fact the other author and not the author of this text. What makes this less of a mystery was the interference of a refined trajectory, and instead, a forestalling of one author attempting to block another author’s telling of how things should be.
I did however like the book, since it was entertaining, until the ending, which seemed too easy a wrap up. I guess the heroine needs an audience to preform for. The promise at the start of the text however was a bit too much for the performance.
